Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research

This book offers the first interdisciplinary survey of community research in the humanities and social sciences to consider such diverse disciplines as philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, disabilities studies, linguistics, communication studies, and film studies. Bringing together leading international experts, the collection of essays critically maps and explores the state of the art in community research, while also developing future perspectives for a cross-disciplinary rethinking of community.

Pursuing such a critical, transdisciplinary approach to community, the book argues, can counteract reductive appropriations of the term ‘community’ and, instead, pave the way for a novel assessment of the concept’s complexity. Since community is, above all, a lived practice that shapes people’s everyday lives, the essays also suggest ways of redoing community; they discuss concrete examples of community practice, thereby bridging the gap between scholars and activists working in the field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030310738

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

B. Jansen (ed.)Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Researchhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31073-8_1

1. Introduction

Bettina Jansen¹  

(1)

Institute of English & American Studies, TU Dresden, Dresden, Sachsen, Germany

Bettina Jansen

Email: [e-mail]

‘Community’ is a key term for our understanding of human sociality. At present, the idea of community enjoys great popularity in private, political, and academic discourses as people invoke, appeal to, debate, protest, and feel the need to defend communities. Gerard Delanty links the contemporary resonance of the idea of community to the current ‘crisis in solidarity and belonging that has been exacerbated and at the same time induced by globalization’ (2010, x). Present-day appeals to community express people’s ‘search for belonging in the insecure conditions of modern society’ (ibid.). These evocations of community articulate our ontological need for belonging or Mitsein (Heidegger [1927] 1977, 161, 167), and at the same time, they point to a perceived deficiency in many Western societies. They suggest that our neoliberal, postmodern societies and their fluid matrix of values have created an unprecedented freedom for the individual at the expense of social cohesion and a sense of community. Thus, far from being ‘lost’ as a result of the transformation from an agrarian, premodern to an industrialised, modern society—as the founding fathers of sociology like Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber had predicted at the end of the nineteenth century (Delanty 2010, 7)—the idea of community has a particular appeal to our contemporary age. ‘[T]he question of belonging has become more acute’ (ibid., 156) because of the processes of globalisation, the digital revolution, the surge in global migration since the turn of the millennium, postmodernism and its radical challenge to preconceived notions of individual and collective identity, the advent of neoliberalism as guiding ideology promoting ‘competition, commodification and privatisation in individual and public life’ (Emejulu 2016, 6), as well as the connected dissolution of the welfare state.

But despite its ubiquity, ‘community’ is a notoriously elusive concept whose meaning often remains vague.¹ ‘Community’ is evoked in terms as diverse as village community, British Asian community, LGBTQ community, Muslim community, academic community, community of interest, community of goods, online community , community college, community radio, community theatre, community singing, community garden, community investment, community service, European Community, African Economic Community, or international community. Community may denote people living in the same area and/or having something in common like their ethnicity, faith, gender identity, occupation, property, a specific interest, etc.; community can describe an activity or an event in which a large number of people participate; it can refer to a political association or, as in ‘international community’, mean all the countries in the world; and community can be used to speak about the general public at large. In either case, the term ‘community’ seems to appeal to our emotions and create a range of positive images. Zygmunt Bauman famously observes that community ‘feels good: whatever the word community may mean, it is good to have a community’ (2001, 1). For, community is associated with ‘a warm place, a cosy and comfortable place’ (ibid.). Similarly, Raymond Williams stresses that ‘unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) [community] seems never to be used unfavourably’ ([1976] 1990, 76).

Yet, there is also a ‘dark side’ to community. The horrific appropriation of the term as Volksgemeinschaft by Nazi Germany had revealed how easily a vague concept like community can be charged with ideological meaning and misused for totalitarian purposes. And it had shown that the notion of community lends itself to (racial) bigotry and the illusion of a homogeneous and eternal union of descent. This negative side of community is very prominent at present as we witness a growing hostility against others and differences. The term ‘community’ is increasingly used to delineate borders and define those who do not belong to one’s community because of their nationality, ethnicity, religious creed, gender, sexuality, disability, or age. This is most apparent in the contemporary resurgence of ‘patriotism and ethnic-absolutism’ (Gilroy 2005) that is observable across the globe, i.e. in Europe’s anti-immigration policies just like Trump’s declaration to ‘make [white] America great again’, Erdoğan’s intention to develop Turkey into a strong Muslim nation, or Narendra Modi’s implementation of a Hindu-nationalism in India. The recent rise in hate crimes clearly illustrates that essentialist, ethnocentric notions of community such as these have fatal consequences for those excluded.

In order to challenge reductive explanations of community and combat the term’s current populist abuses and misuses, we need to develop a critical, transdisciplinary approach to community. The complexities of the concept can only be understood if, as Delanty rightly argues, we ‘[take] a broad and interdisciplinary look at the idea of community’ (2010, xiii). While Delanty’s study of Community (2010) is concerned with ‘modern social and political thought’ (ibid.) and contemplates the findings of sociology, political philosophy, anthropology, and history, this essay collection considers community on a much broader canvas. Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research maps and explores the findings of community research in disciplines as wide-ranging as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, migration studies, sociology, music, and literary studies. That is, the edited collection seeks to offer a truly interdisciplinary account of community scholarship that combines research in the social sciences with the knowledge produced in the humanities. It brings together leading experts in their respective fields of research who are located at universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Continental Europe, and Singapore. But the book does not simply map the state of the art in contemporary community research. Through the book’s overall design and cross-references between contributions, the essay collection also seeks to offer a framework for a critical, interdisciplinary approach to community that has the potential to advance the field in the future. Since community is, above all, a lived practice , all contributions to this volume provide in-depth discussions of concrete communities. In addition, the final section of this book offers examples of experimental, intentional communities in order to illustrate the ways in which community building activities may effect social change.

1.1 The Idea of Community in Western Philosophy from Aristotle to the Present

‘Community’ derives from the Latin adjective communis, which, in turn, may be a combination of com (together) and mūnis (bound, under obligation) or com and unus (one, singularity), expressing a dutiful connection or simply the being together of singularities (OED 2019a, b). This etymological origin of the term continues to shape its meaning until today. For, the diverse uses of ‘community’ in private, public, and academic discourses are united by ‘the idea that community concerns belonging’ (Delanty 2010, xiii).

The Western discourse about community begins in Greek antiquity with Plato’s observation in The Republic (approx. 370 BC) that the individual necessarily requires fellow human beings and the organisational structures of the polis (Rosa et al. 2010, 18).² Following in the footsteps of his teacher, Aristotle elaborates on this idea in Politics (approx. 325 BC), where he famously defines the human being as a zōon politikon (Aristoteles [325 BC] 2006, ch. I 2, 1253a2f.), i.e. a being that constitutes and lives in communities (Rosa et al. 2010, 19). Articulate, sensible, and ethical as the human being is, Aristotle argues, it can only realise itself fully in the political community of the polis (ibid., 19). Thus, the Greek polis stands at the beginning of Western thought about community and ‘provided the basic ideal for all subsequent conceptions of community’ (Delanty 2010, 5). An urban community, the polis was local and particularistic, characterised by immediate relationships and direct participation in public life (ibid.). That is, the Greeks ‘did not know the separation of the social from the political’ (Delanty 2010, 5), of ‘community’ from ‘society’, that only came into existence in the nineteenth century (Williams [1976] 1990, 76).

Aristotle’s notion of the zōon politikon has been of fundamental importance to the history of the idea of community in the West. According to Rosa et al. (2010), it has given rise to two distinct discourses that continue to shape our understanding of community until today. Those who have translated zōon politikon as ‘communal being’ have treated community as an ontological category, while those who have understood zōon politikon as ‘political being’ have used community as a political-ethical category (Rosa et al. 2010, 20).³ The first discourse has been shaped by thinkers like Cicero, Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Wilhelm von Humboldt, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Nancy, who have argued that sociality is a primordial and ahistoric ontological feature of all human beings (ibid., 22). The second discourse has taken its cue from Aristotle’s analysis of the Greek polis and used the term ‘community’ to describe concrete political-ethical examples of human coexistence, spanning from small communities like the family or the circle of friends to large communities like the state or the transnational union (Rosa et al. 2010, 27–28). The simultaneous existence of two distinct discourses on community underlines the term’s complexity. And it helps to explain some of the convolution surrounding the notion of community as several authors, like Aristotle, have explored community both as a more abstract, ontological and a concrete, political-ethical concept.

Importantly, up to the early modern period, the terms ‘community’ and ‘society’ were interchangeable (Delanty 2010, 2). Both were used to describe direct, immediate social relationships (ibid.). Since the seventeenth century, the notion of community acquired a critical edge and came to articulate an opposition to the distant and ‘alien world of the state’ (ibid., 3). In the age of the Enlightenment this critique was directed against the absolutist state. From then on, community has functioned as a ‘utopian concept’ and an ‘emancipatory project’, expressing ‘a vision of a pure or pristine social bond that did not need a state’ (ibid.).

By the nineteenth century, the idea of society had lost its sense of immediacy and direct relationship (Delanty 2010, 2) and came itself to be viewed in opposition to community. In contrast to the ‘direct’, ‘total’, and, as Raymond Williams argues, ‘more significant relationships’ characterising community, the notion of society, like the state, came to be associated with ‘formal’, ‘instrumental’, and ‘abstract relationships’ ([1976] 1990, 76). This opposition between ‘community’ and ‘society’ was systematically theorised by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, whose influential monograph Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) continues to be of great relevance until today.

Parallel to this terminological differentiation, community more clearly developed into a concept critiquing and challenging the state (Delanty 2010, 3). That is, community came to be perceived ‘as something that has been lost with modernity and as something that must be recovered’ (ibid., 4). Modernity as ‘a process dominated by state formation’ was considered to have initiated a separation of the social and the political, ‘confin[ing] the political to the state’ (ibid.). In doing so, ‘modernity has allegedly destroyed community’ (ibid., 4) and community, in turn, has come to express a longing for ‘an organic conception of the social as encompassing political, civic and social relations’ (ibid., 3). That is to say, from the nineteenth century onwards, the discourse of community is ‘a discourse of loss and recovery’ (ibid., 4) and the idea of community articulates at once nostalgia and utopia.

Accordingly, the nineteenth century saw the beginning of what Delanty calls the ‘Age of Ideology’ (2010, 10), lasting from 1830 to 1989. He notes that the political ideologies developed in that period, ranging from liberalism to conservatism and nationalism, and onto communism, socialism, anarchism, Zionism, and fascism, are essentially utopian conceptions of community (ibid.). While community has initially been ‘a radical left ideal’ envisioning ‘a more egalitarian and democratic society’, it became a radical right ideal at the end of the nineteenth century, which saw the rise of national chauvinism (ibid., 12). In the early decades of the twentieth century, nostalgia for the allegedly ‘lost’ community ‘[gave] rise to the myth of the total community that has fuelled fundamentalist, nationalist and fascist ideologies’ (ibid.). Irrespective of Tönnies’s demonstrations against ethnic and nationalist bigotry, his nostalgic notion of ‘community’ became the basis of Nazi Germany’s appropriation of the term as Volksgemeinschaft (community of ‘blood and soil’) (Rosa et al. 2010, 43, 45).⁴

Following the horrendous misuse of the term ‘community’ in Nazi ideology, it became highly problematic, especially in the German context, and was often replaced by other terms like ‘group’, ‘network’, or ‘collective identity’ (Rosa et al. 2010, 53). By the mid-1950s, after the end of Stalinism as another totalitarian ideology of community, the thinking about community had more or less come to a standstill. Yet, with the advent of postmodernity in the 1960s and its radical challenge to long-standing ‘metanarratives’ (Lyotard [1984] 1994), questions of community became highly pertinent again (Rosa et al. 2010, 58–60). As communal identity, like individual identity, was exposed as a changeable, sociocultural, and discursive construction, people began to demand new forms of communal existence. Since the 1970s, a decade dominated by the identity politics of ethnic minorities, women, lesbian, and gay people, the idea of community has enjoyed a renaissance (Rosa 2007, 47, 52–53; Rosa et al. 2010, 58). Questions of (ethnic, national, and postnational) community have also come to the fore as a result of various international developments like the decolonisation of the British Empire, the fall of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, globalisation, the digital revolution, the steady increase in global migration, the worldwide threat of political extremism and religious fundamentalism, the global financial crisis, and climate change (Rosa et al. 2010, 58–59).

As this brief survey of the idea of community in Western thought has shown, ‘community’ is a contingent, historical, and sociocultural category. At different times and in different contexts, ‘community’ has functioned as a discursive tool to describe human beings’ primordial sociality; it has defined direct, affective relationships in opposition to the distant state and, later, the artificial, purpose-driven connections typical of society; it has denoted an egalitarian, democratic utopian ideal; and it has been appropriated by different totalitarian ideologies to evoke an essentialist national, ethnic, or class-based sameness; more recently, community has functioned as a vehicle to claim the rights of marginalised social groups, to articulate digital forms of belonging, and to explore the idea of a cosmopolitan community.

1.2 Previous Research on Community

Compared to the long history of the idea of community that traces its beginnings to antiquity, community research is a recent phenomenon. It begins at the end of the nineteenth century and, following the ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences, undergoes a fundamental change of lasting importance in the 1980s. Until then, research into community had largely been the domain of sociology (Blackshaw 2010, 5). Indeed, the earliest works on community by Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel are at the same time founding texts in the discipline of sociology. Of particular relevance until today is Tönnies’s monograph Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft that introduced the dichotomy of ‘community’ and ‘society’ as two distinct types of social relations, where ‘community’ describes permanent, authentic, and affective organic connections , and ‘society’ denotes temporary, artificial, purpose-driven, and contractual rational alliances ([1887] 1991, esp. 3–4, 207–220). Working at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the founding fathers of sociology observed a ‘loss’ of community, i.e. the transformation of community into society in modernity, particularly as an effect of capitalism and the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation (Tönnies [1887] 1991, 46–48, 209–220; Delanty 2010, 7–9; Crow 2018, 16). Yet, they differed in their evaluation of this development. Tönnies, in particular, expressed nostalgia for the supposedly simpler life in small, rural communities ([1887] 1991, esp. 208–210, 213, and 215; cf. Crow 2018, 16). Following on from Tönnies and his contemporaries, sociological enquiries into community have been concerned with three broad themes: rural vs. urban community, the loss of the ideal of community, and the recovery and (utopian) realisation of community (Blackshaw 2010, 5; Delanty 2010, 9–12). In each case, community has been understood as a social phenomenon and sociologists have conducted empirical studies of specific locales, focusing on social interactions and the mechanisms by which a sense of belonging is established (Blackshaw 2010, 5).

A radically new approach to community was heralded by the publication of both Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities in 1983 and Anthony Cohen’s The Symbolic Structure of Community in 1985 (Delanty 2010, xi–xii; Blackshaw 2010, 6). Anderson and Cohen initiated a shift in focus from the social practices observable in communities to the cognitive and symbolic structures producing communities (Amit 2002, 5–9; Delanty 2010, xi–xii). That is, the cultural turn in the social sciences resulted in an understanding of community as a ‘culturally-defined unit of meaning’ (Delanty 2010, xi), i.e. a sociocultural construction. At the same time, the work of the political scientist Anderson and the anthropologist Cohen demonstrated that community is of cross-disciplinary interest and that disciplines other than sociology can make fruitful contributions to community research, too.

Critics of the cultural turn have argued that it has led to an undue emphasis on the symbolic dimension of community and a lack of attention to the social relations that constitute community (Delanty 2010, xii). Scholars like the anthropologist Vered Amit have pointed to the increasing vagueness of the concept of community, which became something of a catch-all term (Amit 2002, 6). They have argued that the term can only regain its critical capacity if ‘the social [is reinserted] back into community’ (ibid., 9) and renewed emphasis is placed on ‘the actual and limited social relations and practices through which [the idea of community] is realized’ (ibid., 18; cf. Blackshaw 2010, 7). The famous historian Eric Hobsbawm has been similarly dissatisfied with the fuzziness of the term ‘community’. ‘Never’, Hobsbawm maintains, ‘was the word community used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life’ (quoted in Blackshaw 2010, 10).

Until today, there is no scholarly consensus what the term ‘community’ signifies. The term has been used in multiple ways across the humanities and social sciences, depending on the disciplines’ varying research traditions and premises. In general, community research tends to be divided into those scholars who understand community primarily as an empirical phenomenon, a social ‘reality’ that is observable in people’s everyday lives, and those who consider community first and foremost an idea, an imagined entity and interpretation. Delanty observantly argues that ‘[t]hese different uses of the term are unavoidable’ because ‘the term community does in fact designate both an idea about belonging and a particular social phenomenon’ (2010, xii; cf. Blackshaw 2010, 7–9).

In the aftermath of the cultural turn, community has become an object of research in a great variety of disciplines, ranging from philosophy and religious studies to anthropology, sociology, psychology, disability studies, linguistics, and communication studies onto literary studies, music, and film studies. Up to the present, research into community has largely been conducted within the confines of single disciplines. The few transdisciplinary approaches to community that exist, tend to involve no more than two or three, often closely related disciplines. Hence, even though research on community is thriving in the humanities and social sciences at present, so far no attempt has been made to consider the produced knowledge in relation to one another and develop a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to community.

In generalising and necessarily simplifying terms, it is possible to distinguish two types of contemporary community research: research on community as an idea or a social phenomenon as such, and research on a specific aspect of community or a community-related phenomenon. General accounts of community as an idea or a social experience have either been conducted in the discipline of philosophy⁵ or in the social sciences. Social scientific studies of community have been purely sociological (i.e. Blackshaw 2010), purely anthropological (i.e. Amit and Rapport 2012), or they have adopted a transdisciplinary approach that combined related social sciences like sociology, political theory, anthropology, and geography (i.e. Studdert and Walkerdine 2016). Occasionally, these studies have explicitly taken into consideration philosophical conceptions of community (i.e. Bauman 2001; Delanty 2010; Rosa et al. 2010; Bessant 2018). Conversely, specific aspects of community have been addressed in numerous disciplines across the social sciences and the humanities.⁶ Studies within the humanities have rarely developed their own approach to community; instead, they have tended to borrow or ‘appropriate’ (Blackshaw 2010, 7) the term ‘community’ for their own ends and purposes from the social sciences, particularly sociology, or from philosophy without, however, problematising what it actually means.

Indeed, with the exception of few critical studies on community in the fields of sociology and philosophy,⁷ previous research on community has been strikingly uncritical in its use of the term ‘community’. As Vered Amit and Paula Martín-Salván note in this volume with regard to the disciplines of anthropology and literary studies respectively, scholars ‘have not problematised or theorised’ (Amit) the term but ‘taken [it] for granted’ (Martín-Salván). Using ‘community’ as a ‘fairly casual reference to groupings or collectivities’ (Amit), they have created ‘terminological fuzziness’ (Martín-Salván). Despite the term’s omnipresence in contemporary research, then, there are only few systematic theories of community (Rosa et al. 2010, 11).

Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research responds to the outlined desideratum of critical, transdisciplinary community scholarship. The essay collection starts from the premise that we can only grasp the complexity of the concept of community if we choose a multi-perspective approach. Bringing together leading experts from fifteen disciplines and areas of research, the book offers the first truly interdisciplinary and international survey of the research on community that exists in the humanities and social sciences. But the book does not merely provide an interdisciplinary introduction into community research. The contributors to this volume critically reflect on the state of the art in community research in their respective fields in order to develop new approaches and suggest perspectives for future research into community. Several authors directly respond to each other’s work, paving the way for a transdisciplinary approach to community. I will take up these efforts at the end of this Introduction when I critically survey the essays collected in this volume and, on that basis, carve out a theoretical framework for a transdisciplinary, critical community scholarship that will hopefully allow for a novel assessment of the notion of community.

1.3 Past and Present Community Practice

Since community is crucially as much an academic topic as a practical concern in people’s everyday lives, Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research provides numerous examples of applied research, fieldwork, and community projects, bridging the gap between scholarship and activism. In an attempt to contextualise these case studies, this section offers a brief survey of the large and diverse field of community practice. It is impossible here to do justice to the great variety of existing approaches to community that are variously called ‘community development’, ‘social development’, ‘community organising’, ‘community engagement’, ‘community building’, ‘community intervention’, ‘community work’, ‘community education’, ‘popular education’, ‘critical pedagogy’, or more generally ‘critical community practice’ (cf. Gilchrist and Taylor 2011, 1; Sites et al. 2012, 39).⁸ These terms are used in different ways, sometimes synonymously and sometimes in clear differentiation from one another, and their degree of theoretisation greatly varies. The following remarks are confined to ‘community development’ and ‘community organising’ as the two most elaborate conceptions of community practice.

There is no consensus whether ‘community development’ and ‘community organising’ constitute distinct phenomena of social action or whether ‘community development’ should be treated as an umbrella term that also refers to ‘community organising’ as a subcategory. A wide understanding of ‘community development’ would define it as ‘a broad approach to working with people in communities to achieve social justice’ (Gilchrist and Taylor 2011, 9), which involves informal education, collective action, and organisation development (ibid., 10–12). Community development, thus understood, always takes its starting point from ‘individuals, groups and networks that want or need to cooperate in order to achieve change at a local or community level’ (ibid., 9). It seeks to ensure that ‘the issues and priorities are identified and agreed by the communities themselves’ (ibid., 9). Community development wishes to be inclusive and tries to involve as many community members as possible regardless of gender, ethnicity, class, age, sexual orientation, disability, etc. (ibid., 14). It offers diverse possibilities of participation in decision-making processes and thereby intends to empower people (ibid.). Finally, community development seeks to establish cooperation as a core value in communities (15), encouraging people ‘to work together towards a collective solution to a shared concern’ (9).

Scholars and practitioners who have a narrow understanding of ‘community development’ stress that it advocates consensus and intends to achieve social change through ‘a collaborative win-win process’ (Schutz and Sandy 2011, 38), whereas ‘community organising’ is driven by the conviction that social change can only happen through conflict because it necessitates a fundamental shift in power relations (ibid., 37–38). While community development is often a top-down process (38), community organising is decidedly bottom-up, seeking to establish ‘grassroots democracy’ (37).

There are two main approaches to community development in the narrow sense. The so-called ‘deficit’ model views communities as ‘made up of problems’ (Schutz and Sandy 2011, 38) that need to be fixed with the help of external professionals, community agencies, institutions, or government funding (cf. Gilchrist and Taylor 2011, 12–13). The ‘asset-based’ model, in turn, stresses that every community possesses resources—i.e. skills, local knowledge, leading figures, or influential local institutions—that can be mobilised to effect local change (ibid., 13; Schutz and Sandy 2011, 38). Since asset-based community development, too, is directed by outside experts and depends on external funding, Schutz and Sandy argue that it is ultimately also a top-down process in which ‘individuals and groups from outside the community hold the real power’ (2011, 38).

Conversely, community organising intends to ‘bring powerless and relatively powerless people together in solidarity to defend and advance their interests and values’ (Schutz and Miller 2015, 2). It essentially ‘seeks to alter the relations of power’ between dominant and marginalised social groups (Schutz and Sandy 2011, 12; italics in the original), aiming at ‘radical change to make the system work for the dispossessed’ (Beck and Purcell 2013, ix). Community organising, like community development, is initiated by external organisers. But these organisers empower community members by employing the following strategies: they aim at ‘full participation of those most affected by a social problem’ (Schutz and Sandy 2011, 37), they identify and train community leaders that will direct the community’s endeavours in the long run, they establish long-lasting local alliances and networks of support, they raise money for community organising efforts, they develop strategies of negotiation, and they devise public actions that demonstrate the community’s collective power to those institutions, politicians, etc. against which it campaigns for social change (cf. ibid., 12). Community organisers, then, ‘develop strategies for helping people come together to demand change’ (ibid., 22) so that the community itself holds the power.

While modern community organising begins with Saul Alinsky and his establishment of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in Chicago in 1939 (Schutz and Sandy 2011, 57), the history of collective action is much longer. The origin of community organising, community development, and other community practice efforts may be traced to the US-American labour movement in the second half of the nineteenth century (ibid., 48). In the USA, the development of collective action was crucially shaped by the Settlement House Movement at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the first- and second-wave women’s movements, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, the environmental movement, the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, the anti-poverty Community Action Program beginning in 1964, and the gay rights movement (ibid., 47–82).⁹ Community development narrowly understood as collaborative, ‘politically palatable’ (ibid., 72) and externally funded effort arguably begins in the 1960s when the design of the federal Community Action Program was changed and service organisations run by professionals replaced contentious local organising efforts (ibid., 71–72). Ever since, community development initiatives offering well-paid, often government-funded positions have been competing with conflict-based grassroots community organising efforts.

In the UK, community development in the narrow sense is older than community organising. Its history begins in the post-war period when it was employed as a colonial strategy to support the decolonisation process, ‘helping move countries towards self-rule and ultimately independence’ (Beck and Purcell 2013, 67). Post-independence, colonial community developers returned to the UK and applied their skills in neighbourhood projects (ibid., 67–68). Inspired by the US Community Action Program, the 1970s saw the establishment of the national Community Development Project, which intended to improve conditions of housing, unemployment, and poverty in twelve local areas across the UK (ibid., 68–69). Community developers’ Marxist critique of capitalism as structural reason for the observed local problems did not sit well with the programme’s initiators and made community development as a method of social change dubious to policymakers for a long time (Gilchrist and Taylor 2011, 2; Beck and Purcell 2013, 69). Ever since, community development efforts have tended to ‘exclude an overall structural analysis of social and economic problems’ (Beck and Purcell 2013, 70) and, instead, conducted ‘localised small-scale intervention[s]’ (ibid., 68). From the 1970s onwards, community development has become more inclusive, involving more women, black, and Asian practitioners and addressing problems connected to gender, ethnicity, and racism (Beck and Purcell 2013, 69–70). After community development had suffered from severe funding cuts under Margaret Thatcher (ibid., 70), a New Labour’s renewed funding support has led to a renaissance of community development at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries (ibid.).

Community organising, on the other hand, was only introduced to the UK in the 1980s, namely with the publication of James Pitt and Maurice Keane’s Community Organizing—You’ve Never Really Tried It: The Challenge to Britain from the USA in 1984 (Beck and Purcell 2013, 72). Yet, it took another decade to establish the first community organisations, whose main, overarching organisation is Citizens UK (ibid., 75). The reason for this rather late appearance of Alinsky’s community organising model in Britain, Beck and Purcell argue, is twofold: community organising’s emphasis on power and conflict is ‘very un-British’ (ibid., 67), and the history of wide-ranging welfare state provision prepaid through taxation has made people doubtful of the need to set up and fund community organising initiatives outside the state structure (ibid., 67, 71). Most recently, David Cameron’s coalition government explicitly evoked the Saul Alinsky tradition of community organising as a means to create a ‘Big Society’ where citizens actively engage in improving the social and economic conditions of their local communities (ibid., 76–77). But rather than state-fund Alinsky-style conflict-based initiatives for radical social change, Cameron’s programme seemed to appropriate a term made popular by Barack Obama’s community organising past and use it to describe cooperative community development projects designed to ameliorate the effects of government cuts to welfare provision (cf. Beck and Purcell 2013, 77–78).

Originating in the USA, both community organising and community development have travelled the globe. Apart from the UK, community organising has been adopted in ‘Canada, […] Australia, the Indian Sub-continent, South East Asia, Africa and South America’ (Beck and Purcell 2013, ix). Owing to its colonial roots, community development has spread less widely, remaining largely confined to the Global North, including OECD countries like Canada and Australia (Gilchrist and Taylor 2011, 3). ‘In the global South’, Gilchrist and Taylor stress, ‘[community development] retains its colonial associations’ (2011, 2). Thus, community development initiatives in the Global South directed and funded by the UN or other external bodies have to be viewed critically.

As the definitions of community development and community organising have clearly shown, community practitioners tend to conceive of community as a geographical entity describing a local neighbourhood, i.e. an urban community, a village, or regional community. While this emphasis on physical proximity is rather conventional, particularly given our digital age, it implies a fundamental openness to others, treating all residents as community members regardless of their age, class,